Hope In The Dark

Tracing a history of activism and social change over the past decades - including the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Zapatista uprising in Mexico to Seattle in 1999, and the worldwide marches against the war in Iraq, this title proposes a vision of cause-and-effect relations that provides grounds for political engagement.

With Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to act in a world whose future remains uncertain and unknowable. Drawing on her decades of activism and a wide reading of environmental, cultural, and political history, Solnit argues that radicals have a long, neglected history of transformative victories, that the positive consequences of our acts are not always immediately seen, directly knowable, or even measurable, and that pessimism and despair rest on an unwarranted confidence about what is going to happen next.